Environmental behavior - Discrepancies between aspirations and reality

On the basis of an empirical study in Switzerland and Germany, it is shown that there are considerable inconsistencies between citizens' environmental attitudes and their behavior. A disaggregation of the multidimensional concept of 'environmental behavior' and a look at this behavior from the viewpoint of rational actors, are proposed as two perspectives from which to get a better understanding of these inconsistencies. Empirical analyses (making use of these two perspectives) lead to an identification of three cognitive strategies by which individual actors try to harmonize and to reconcile seemingly incongruent environmental attitudes and behaviors. These strategies can be subsumed under the short-hand labels 'attention-shifting strategy', 'low-cost strategy' and 'subjective-rationality strategy'.